Let it snow! Let it snow!

December 25, 2007

Matt

True story: I never touched snow that stayed on the ground until I was 21. It was at Lake Tahoe, and technically it was on a beach, but I still had no idea what to do with this strange stuff. (Pictured on right.)

Growing up in Houston, where I’m visiting now, it gets plenty cold and often rains, but snow? Never. I think once when I was in elementary school some flakes fell from the sky and the city basically shut down in amazement. When I was younger (okay, maybe 16) whenever the sky was white with clouds my father would declare “Those are snow clouds.” Everyone would laugh, but I didn’t get the joke until a good 20 years of my life had passed without meaningful amounts of snow.

There was one exception. Christmas of ’04 I had just moved to San Francisco and started a job at CNET two months before. My rent was 6x what it had been in Houston and between that and some other travel I was completely broke by the time December came around. of course I couldn’t tell my parents, so I had some sort of logical reason why my first Christmas away from home I wasn’t going to be able to visit, and I didn’t. It wasn’t a total wash, I ended up writing bbPress and doing a lot of the work for what would become WordPress 1.5. But that one year I didn’t go back a nationwide snow storm brought Houston its very first White Christmas. My friends Sarah and Jess delighted in rubbing it in:

While these look like innocent pictures, they really stung. I vowed never to miss a Christmas in Houston again, knowing full well that there will probably never be another White Christmas in my lifetime

But now regardless of the weather conditions wherever you’re spending this holiday season, you can at least have snow on your blog! Go to your Dashboard, then Presentation, then click on Extras and you’ll see this:

Check the box, hit save, and you and your visitors will see small white flakes of snow coming down on your blog. (This works best if you don’t have a theme with a white background.) Much like snow in Houston, the flakes won’t stay long on the ground, I think because our servers tend to be a little hot. This feature will be available for a limited time only, on January 2nd it will disappear until next year, but just imagine it as our little present to you, an opportunity to spread a little cheer.

Merry Christmas! Here’s a latin jazz version of Let it Snow to listen to while activating the feature:

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thank you! as a SETX native …i do recall a decent ‘snow’ way back in the mid 70’s. had a picture of our dog at the time playing in the snow. black dog on white snow. hadn’t thought of that pic in decades. heh…thanks for the feature, looks really good on a dark blog.
(and a horrendous ice storm in ’97…ugh!)

oh my gosh!!! Real snow!!!!!!!!!! And the best thing is that it’s in the 60’s outside!!!
What my brother failed to mention in his little anecdote, was that my father would point to the sky in July, and say “look, baby! Those are snow clouds!!!” and I would get all excited. about the time that I figured out the game, a new gullible kid came along (Matt), and the joke started all over again.

Wow! Merry Christmas to you & your family Matt! I had no idea that you shared my hometown of Houston! I now live just south of city limits. I thought up till yesterday that we were gonna have one of our famous (weather wise- 80’s) Beach Christmas Days!

Hey, are you an Aggie? I kept thinking I was just imagining little A&M “figures of speech” , and there’s your blogtitle too; my son is an Aggie!
I am very new to blogging and its all foreign lingo to me so I won’t even try to add the snow, but its cool, neat or whatev the current fav wurd is! thanks for keeping us up to date on all the great (and not so great) features and fixes. Happy New Year!

incidentally, i first saw and touched snow at lake tahoe too! it was early spring so it was totally unexpected. it’ll b a climate disaster if it snows in my tropical country so thanx for the snow tis x’mas!

*waves from practically across the street* Thanks, Matt! I remember when we had that snow in ’04…we all had a huge snowball fight (well, huge as we can get here *LOL*). Thanks for the awesome blog [script] present. 😀 I hope you have a very Merry Christmas!

Im using a totally black theme and I just activated the snow thingy. I dont know if its because its so pretty or because I had ungodly ammounts of alcohol last night but I really wanna pick my laptop up and shake it a bit to see if it makes the snow move faster for a while, like a paperweight. *L* I live in the middle of Sweden and we didnt even get a white christmas this year, so this is heavily appreciated.

I’m from Nebraska where it snows all the time and always drifts up to six feet. On the East Coast it’s been pretty “white-dry” this time of year over the years and we have no snow for the holidays this year.

wow.. thanks!! this is really great! Oh Matt, cant believe u missed it when it finally snowed! At least you managed to afterall 😉 I’m still yet to touch my very first snowflake [it doesn’t snow on this part of the globe 😦 ]

i am LOVIN the snow!! thanks so much–it is soooooo much fun falling on my black background and across my winter solstice posts–even across an image i got form nasa of the mooon!!! soo very cool and thank you again!!!